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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 





PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 

1890. 



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PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 

1890. 



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Copyright, 1890, by J. B. Lippincott Company 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Holmes, Oliver Wendell, born in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, August 29, 180;), was. the son of Rev. 
Abiel and Sarah (Wendell) Holmes. His father was 
a Congregational minister, the author of Annals of 
America and other works; his mother, descended 
from a Dutch ancestor, was related to many well- 
known families in New England and New York'. -He 
entered Harvard College at the age of sixteen, and 
graduated, in what became a famous class, in 1829. 
He began the study of law, but after a year gave it 
up, and entered upon the study of medicine. After 
the customary course at the medical school of Har- 
vard he spent over two years in the hospitals and 
schools of Europe, chiefly in Paris ; and on his return 
home took the degree of M.D. in 1836. Three years 
later he was professor of Anatomy and Physiology at 
Dartmouth College, but after two years' service he 
resigned and engaged in general practice in Boston. 
He married in 1840 Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of 
a justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. 
(Three children were born of the marriage, of whom 



4 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

one, O. W. Holmes, jun., served as a captain in the 
civil war, and is a judge and an eminent writer upon 
legal subjects.) In 1847 he was appointed professor 
of Anatomy at Harvard, which place he held until 
1882. He was highly respected as a man of science, 
and beloved as an instructor; but as time went on his 
literary genius quite overbore his professional zeal, 
and it is as a poet and essayist that he will be re- 
membered. 

He began writing verse while an undergraduate, 
but his first efforts were not remarkable. While in 
the law school he contributed to the Collegian a few 
poems of a light and humorous character which first 
gave indications of his future power; among these 
are 'Evening, by a Tailor' and 'The Height of the 
Ridiculous.' There is a reminiscence of his life in 
Paris in the tender poem beginning 'Ah, Clemence ! 
when I saw thee last.' A little later was written ' The 
Last Leaf,' which contains one perfect stanza, and 
which from the blending of quaintness and pathos is 
perhaps the most fortunate and characteristic of his 
minor poems. For some years the muse visited him 
by stealth, the votary fearing for his professional repu- 
tation in a town so noted for propriety. A small 
volume of these early poems was published in 1836. 
Twenty years passed with desultory efforts and a 
slowly-growing power, when by the publication of 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857-58) he be- 
came suddenly famous. No literary event since the 
Nodes had more strongly affected the reading world. 
The success was due to its fresh, unconventional tone, 
its playful wit and wisdom, and to the lovely vignettes 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



5 



of verse. Apart from the merits of thought and style, 
the pages have the charm of personal confidence ; the 
reader becomes at once a pupil and an intimate friend. 
The tone assumed is egotistical, but the force and the 
comedy (as every man with imagination sees) are 
bound up in that assumption. The Professor at the 
Breakfast Table (1858-59) was written upon the same 
lines and has qualities equal to those of its prede- 
cessor, but it deals with deeper questions and in a less 
familiar way. TJie Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) 
takes the reader into the region of religious and philo- 
sophical ideas. ' God is Love' is the keynote of its 
doctrine. His first effort in fiction was Elsie Venner 
(1859-60), a study of hereditary impressions and ten- 
dencies. The Guardian Angel (1867) is a picture of 
rural New England. A Mortal Antipathy was written 
in 1885. It is scarcely a novel as the term is generally 
understood, but there is a thread of story on which 
the author hangs his observations, as he had done 
before in the Autocrat. The introduction to this 
book is autobiographical and historical, and gives a 
delightful view of Cambridge as it was in the author's 
boyhood, and a sadly amusing account of early 
American literature. The works before named ap- 
peared in the Atlantic Monthly, of which he was one 
of the founders. He wrote for it also many occa- 
sional essays and poems. Besides the early volume 
(1836), he published Songs in Many Keys (1862), Songs 
of Many Seasons (1875), Tlie Iron Gate (1880), and 
Before the Curfezv (1888). His other (prose) works 
are Currents and Counter-currents (1861), Soundings 
from the Atlantic (1864), Border Lines of Knoivledge 



6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

(1862), Mechanism in Thought and Moj^als (1871), and 
Memoirs of Motley (1879) and Emerson (1885). He 
is also the writer of the biographical sketch of Emer- 
son in this Encyclopaedia, and of Our Hundred Days 
in Europe (1887), an account of a visit made in 1886, 
during which he received honours from the universi- 
ties of Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh. 

It is difficult to make a summary of the traits of 
a writer so versatile, and who has achieved success in 
so many fields. By his own generation he will be re- 
membered as a great talker, in the highest sense. The 
present writer never met his equal. His intellect is keen 
and powerful; his observation is instinctive ; and his 
enthusiasm and energy would have carried through a 
man of less brilliant parts. His verse is melodious, 
compact, and rounded by art; its Gallic liveliness 
tempered by the even measure, and enforced by the 
point, of the i8th century. There is not in it a trace 
of the manner of recent English poets. Still, in its 
thought, its humanity, and its suggestions of science, 
it is seen that he is a man of his own century, and 
among the most advanced. Among specimens of his 
varied powers may be cited ' The Last Leaf,' already 
mentioned, 'The Chambered Nautilus,' ' Grandmother's 
Story' (of the battle of Bunker's Hill), 'Sun and 
Shadow,' ' For the Burns Centennial,' ' On lending a 
Punch-bowl,' and ' The One-hoss Shay.' He is es- 
pecially happy in his tributes to brother poets — as to 
Longfellow and Lowell, and to Whittier on his seven- 
tieth birthday. During the civil war he wrote many 
impassioned lyrics in defence of the Union — probably 
the best patriotic songs of the time. Of his prose it 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. j 

may be said that, whatever may be the subject, it 
always engages attention, and is always sid generis. 
The reader feels himself in contact with a strong 
mind, full of the fruit of reading, and with a char- 
acter that is full of surprises. The choice of words 
is directed by a poet's inevitable instinct, and the 
general treatment is both precise and delicate. In 
the essay upon Mechanism in Thought and Morals 
there is an acuteness and subtlety which might have 
made a metaphysician ; only that might have deprived 
the world of one of its most original and delightful 
essayists. There are degrees of value in his works, 
but it appears that his fame will rest chiefly upon The 
Autocrat, The Professor, and certain of his poems. Of 
his writings in general it should be said that, though 
his sparkling wit and flowing humour are evident to 
the most casual reader, a closer study reveals other 
and more stately qualities which give him a place 
among the great writers of the time. 

There are Lives by W. S. Kennedy (Boston, 1883) and Emma E. 
Brown (1884), the latter with a list of his writings. 



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